When to Look Outside Your Industry for Your Next CIO

(Stefan Dietrich, see full bio at the end of this article, has joined CITO Research as a contributing analyst. This is his second post.)

In the life of every company, at some point, corporate leaders become dissatisfied with their CIO or CTO and seek to “make a change” as the managers put it in the movie Bull Durham.

But, do they really want to make a change? Most of the time the desire for change ends up with a search process to find someone exactly like the CIO or CTO that was just fired. Does this really make sense? Einstein defined insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Apparently, when it comes to finding new technical leadership, insanity is quite prevalent.

This article argues that much of the time, if a company is really dissatisfied with their CIO or CTO, they should consider finding someone that has different skills and brings a new perspective. In other words, in making a change, they should really make a change.

In this discussion I’m going to leave aside the meaty question of whether CIOs get fired too frequently for reasons beyond their control. Also, from here on we’ll use CIO as a proxy for both CIO and CTO.

Round up the Usual Suspects

Most of the time, the search process for a new CIO does start with the idea of finding someone who doesn’t have the defects that caused the problem in the current occupant of the office. The C-suite imagines that they could get better service from an executive who has different skills or more talents, and so the search process starts.

But then the terms of the search are set and most often the C-suite insists on finding someone who has significant experience in their industry. The preoccupation with finding a CIO who an industry veteran almost guarantees a repeat cycle, because each industry has specific ways how things are being done, addressing problems with the vendors and conventions of that industry. Hence, a new person is unlikely to bring new ideas or approaches. Rounding up the usual suspects will get the usual results.

It does make some difference whether the company in question is a technology company seeking technical leadership or if the role is a supporting IT function for a non-IT business. However, in both cases, the CIO is a critical function, and the search is also risk minimization mission, that will focus on finding somebody different in the one dimension the former occupant of that seat was lacking. The “new guy” might be for example a little more conservative on the subject of outsourcing, or a bit more aggressive about moving applications to the cloud. But otherwise, he may as well be the same person.